Month: July 2013

Man machine, pseudo human being: Computer Chess

Turns out Australia hasn’t banned *all* guns

by digby

Via the Conversation:

A male kangaroo’s forearm size could be a sexually selected trait and help them find a mate, a new study has found.

In fact, male kangaroos frequently adopt poses to show off their muscly arms to females, the authors have said.
[…]
Associate Professor Rod Wells, an Australian marsupial expert from Flinders University, said big arm muscles may offer males “additional advantage from either females finding big forelimbs sexy or alternatively the males which win the right to access the females are then strong enough to overpower any unwilling female.”

“Males are not simply getting bigger but their forelimbs are getting disproportionally bigger not only in bone length and diameter but also in muscle mass. The authors relate this to male-male competition for right to inseminate females,” he said.

Hey, if you’ve got it flaunt it.

And I have to say that Kangaroo looks pretty hot …

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Wondering who we’re at war with? Don’t worry your pretty little heads about it.

by digby

I happened to see “Dirty Wars” the other day and was as blown away as everyone said I would be. It’s an amazing documentary and I can’t get many of the images out of my head.

If anyone ever doubted it, the US is making enemies all over the world with its War on Terror. They seem to truly believe they can kill them all and then we will be safe.

And you aren’t allowed to know about it:

In a major national security speech this spring, President Obama said again and again that the U.S. is at war with “Al Qaeda, the Taliban, and their associated forces.”

So who exactly are those associated forces? It’s a secret.

At a hearing in May, Sen. Carl Levin, D-Mich., asked the Defense Department to provide him with a current list of Al Qaeda affiliates.

The Pentagon responded – but Levin’s office told ProPublica they aren’t allowed to share it. Kathleen Long, a spokeswoman for Levin, would say only that the department’s “answer included the information requested.”

A Pentagon spokesman told ProPublica that revealing such a list could cause “serious damage to national security.”

“Because elements that might be considered ‘associated forces’ can build credibility by being listed as such by the United States, we have classified the list,” said the spokesman, Lt. Col. Jim Gregory. “We cannot afford to inflate these organizations that rely on violent extremist ideology to strengthen their ranks.”

It’s not an abstract question: U.S. drone strikes and other actions frequently target “associated forces,” as has been the case with dozens of strikes against an Al Qaeda offshoot in Yemen.

During the May hearing, Michael Sheehan, Assistant Secretary of Defense for Special Operations and Low-Intensity Conflict, said he was “not sure there is a list per se.” Describing terrorist groups as “murky” and “shifting,” he said, “it would be difficult for the Congress to get involved in trying to track the designation of which are the affiliate forces” of Al Qaeda.
[…]
Jack Goldsmith, a professor at Harvard Law who served as a legal counsel during the Bush administration and has written on this question at length, told ProPublica that the Pentagon’s reasoning for keeping the affiliates secret seems weak. “If the organizations are ‘inflated’ enough to be targeted with military force, why cannot they be mentioned publicly?” Goldsmith said. 

He added that there is “a countervailing very important interest in the public knowing who the government is fighting against in its name.”

Yeah, no kidding. Especially since these expensive, secret dirty wars are making us less safe.

My hero!

by digby

Sarah Slamen on Bill Maher:

If you want to see her entire speech before the Texas legislature, I featured it in this post. It’s as awesome as she is.

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It really is time to raise Social Security benefits

by digby

… and a couple of Senators are on it:

This really does need to be done and it won’t happen by magic. We must start the drumbeat and keep it up as long as it takes. This is where it starts.

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QOTD: President Obama

by digby

Pres Obama vows the US “will maintain the strongest military the world has ever known – bar none.”
— Mark Knoller (@markknoller) July 27, 2013

… no matter what it costs or how much the citizens have to sacrifice at home to keep it up.(Or how many lives are lost all over the world to justify it.)

Everyone’s on board with that, right? Right??????

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Uhm no: why progressives don’t want Larry Summers as Fed Chair by Chris Hayes

by digby

If you are looking for a perfect, concise argument for the appointment of Janet Yellen as Fed Chair, look no further than this excellent Chris Hayes commentary:

Visit NBCNews.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

I think I’ve been to generous to Summers. His real qualifications for this job are thinner than I realized:

He doesn’t seem particularly interested in monetary policy. Monetary policy—controlling the country’s money supply—is the Fed’s key policy lever. But Summers, for all his notorious outspokenness, has given very few indications that feels strongly about it one way or the other.

“Most indications suggest he doesn’t think it’s very important right now, so it’s kind of weird that he’d want the job [of Fed chair],” said Konczal.

“He’s kind of poo-pooed the role of the Fed, at least seemingly,” said Baker.

But ok, so a bunch of dirty hippie Commies don’t like Summers and want some feminazi to run the world’s most important Central Bank. Who cares, right? Well…

Wall Street has spoken: It would rather President Barack Obama pick Janet Yellen than Larry Summers to be the next Federal Reserve chair. In fact, it would just as soon pick CNBC reporter Steve Liesman to run the Fed as Summers. 

Wall Street favors Yellen by a surprisingly wide margin: CNBC asked bankers and traders who should run the Fed if and when Ben Bernanke steps down at the end of his term in January, and 50 percent of them chose Yellen, currently the Fed’s vice chairman. 

Larry Summers, the former Treasury secretary and economic adviser to Obama, got a whopping 2.5 percent. Also getting 2.5 percent was Liesman, CNBC’s economics reporter.

The second-biggest vote-getter was Bernanke, with 12.5 percent of respondents saying they’d rather see him get a third term heading the Fed. Tied with Bernanke was Stanford economist John Taylor, a favorite of conservatives. 

Wall Street’s support for Yellen might seem surprising at first, given that Summers was part of the crew that deregulated the financial sector back in the 1990s. That helped lead to the financial crisis, sure, but it also lined the pockets of Wall Street. Banks are now pushing hard against post-crisis rules regulations, and having a Wall Street-friendly guy like Summers in charge of the Fed, a key bank regulator, might seem like a no-brainer. 

But Wall Street has much more on its mind than regulation, and its other concerns help explain the support for Yellen.

For one thing, Yellen is widely seen as more “dovish” than Summers, meaning she favors easier monetary policies than Summers. Wall Street loves it some sweet, sweet easy money, of course, but it also likes economic growth, all else being equal, and it’s easier to see Yellen getting behind stimulus for the economy. 

“Yellen is seen as being in the same vein as Bernanke and thus a continuation of monetary stimulus for longer,” Anthony Cronin, a bond trader at Societe Generale SA, told the Wall Street Journal’s Min Zeng. “Summers is a bit of an unknown monetary policy-wise for the market, increasing the risk that he may be more hawkish than the Bernanke/Yellen camp.” 

The other, more surprising factor helping Yellen with Wall Street seems to be concern about Summers’ personality. Yellen is personally a lot more like Bernanke — soft-spoken, collegial, academic — while Summers occasionally has the temperament of a raccoon that has just been thrown down the stairs. 

Wall Street has gotten accustomed to the Bernanke approach and doesn’t want to see it changed dramatically.

“They support Yellen because they think Summers is a little more prickly, a little more difficult and may not be as good a communicator,” CNBC reporter Bob Pisani said on-air on Friday.

Yeah, that’s a concern alright. The fellow who drops little rhetorical bombs everywhere he goes might not be the best choice to head the Fed during a very challenging economic time with skittish markets riding an asset bubble. Just saying …

The Democratic old boys network that’s favoring Summers doesn’t want to lose control. But they need to open up their circle to include women who’ve consistently been right while they have consistently been wrong. They may not understand they need to do this, but they do:

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What’s 66 million years in the great scheme of things?

by digby

For a little perspective on time consider this:

The Mesozoic Era, which lasted from about 250 million to 66 million years ago, is often called the Age of Dinosaurs. As a kid, this brought to mind one endless summer when dinosaurs flourished. And many of the books I read picked one environment from three different periods within the era to represent dinosaur life. Little Coelophysis was the canonical Triassic dinosaur; the huge sauropods and theropods of the Morrison Formation represented the Jurassic, and a Cretaceous Tyrannosaurus versus Triceratops face-off ultimately capped off the succession. With the periods juxtaposed this way, millions of years didn’t seem so very long.

But let’s unpack some of that scenery. Diplodocus, Apatosaurus, Allosaurus, Stegosaurus and their neighbors roamed western North America about 150 million years ago. This slice of time falls in the latter portion of the Jurassic. The traditional representatives of the latest Cretaceous scene—Tyrannosaurus and Triceratops—did not evolve until about 67 million years ago.

By themselves, these dates are just labels, but think of them falling along evolution’s timeline. About 83 million years separated Apatosaurus from Tyrannosaurus and Allosaurus from Triceratops. The so-called Age of Mammals—which began when the non-avian dinosaurs were wiped out—has been going on for about 66 million years. Less time separates us from Tyrannosaurus rex than separated T. rex from Stegosaurus.

This old planet will survive just fine if we do nothing about global warming. It’s the humans and animals who live on it who’ll have the problems.

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Defending our treatment of prisoners to Russia

by David Atkins

Let the weight of this headline sink in for a moment:

Snowden won’t face torture or execution, Holder tells Russia

Nice work, America. Class act.

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QOTD: Will Wilkinson

by digby

On Chris Christie’s unctuous, manipulative exploitation of the 9/11 victims and the endless Global War on Terror:

Now that justice has been done, and the honour of our dead thereby secured, we must restore our political order to normality and get on with our lives. When there is murder, we bring the murderer to justice and carry on with the dignity of our ideals intact. We do not panic. We do not lose our heads in craven desperation for total safety. We do not declare an indefinite “war on murder”, and use the small but ever-present threat of murder to justify, say, the comprehensive monitoring of communications and, thereby, the abolition of private life. We don’t do that. To do so would exceed the demands of justice, and amount to a fresh and monstrous injustice.

To use the memory of a terrible crime to perpetrate further crime is to dishonour the original victim and ourselves. To demand that the NSA simmer down and rein it in is not to dismiss or minimise the suffering and injustice of the victims of terrorism, but to defend the honour of their memory and the dignity of their survivors, which the rights of our constitution were instituted to secure. To enable the gutting of basic constitutional protections by insinuating that those who would defend them are somehow the allies of terror, and therefore need to explain themselves to the victims of terrorism, is a revolting inversion.

It is Mr Christie who needs to explain to the survivors of 9/11 why he insists on overshooting the mark of justice, churning the mass grave of the honoured dead, and suggesting that those who have suffered and lost, because they have suffered and lost, can be counted on to abet the theft of their own rights.

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